In May 2018, Broadway.com announced that composer and lyricist Andrew Lippa would premiere a new work with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus: Unbreakable, a musical chronology of the LGBTQ experience in America from 1900 to today. It followed Lippa’s I Am Harvey Milk, which the chorus premiered and which played a one-night concert at Lincoln Center in 2014 with Kristin Chenoweth.
120 years, one decade per song
Lippa told Broadway.com he drew inspiration from August Wilson’s ten-play cycle about the African American experience. As the Chronicle described it, each song represents a decade. The piece honors figures such as Sylvia Rivera, Bayard Rustin and Jane Addams, and looks at moments like Harvard’s secret 1920 court and the Lavender Scare, when federal employees were fired for being suspected of being gay. One number, “41,” takes its words from the 1981 New York Times article that first reported a rare cancer in gay men.
“It’s not just a piece of political theater.”
— Andrew Lippa, as quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle
The premiere
Directed by Robert Kelley, Unbreakable played three performances at the Nourse Theater on June 22–23, 2018, as the finale of the chorus’s 40th season. Lippa performed alongside Lisa Vroman, Britney Coleman and Marcus Paige. In rehearsal, the Chronicle found a chorus that joked between numbers and went quiet for the hardest ones, and members old and new who described the chorus itself as living history.
Watch: Sylvia
Britney Coleman performs “Sylvia” from the 2018 production, with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa. SFGMC released this archival footage through SFGMC TV in April 2020.
Sources
This post summarizes reporting by Broadway.com and the San Francisco Chronicle. Details attributed to those outlets are their reporting; see the sources below.
- Broadway.com, “Andrew Lippa’s Musical Chronology of the Gay Experience, Unbreakable, to Make World Premiere in San Francisco” by Andy Lefkowitz, May 3, 2018. Read the original story
- San Francisco Chronicle, “The S.F. Gay Men’s Chorus, part of history itself, sings it out in ‘Unbreakable’” by Ryan Kost, June 2018. Read the original story
- SFGMC TV — Sylvia, 2018 performance
- San Francisco Bay Times — Unbreakable performance coverage
